Technology

Everyone's pointing out that this is specifically about admins (not editors) and the general difficulty of wikipedia editing specifically due to its rules and reversions, but I really feel compelled to offer a counterpoint: this applies to wiki editing in general.

I've been editing mediawiki-based game sites since the mid 2000s - before Wikia became Fandom, before it was evil, before it started gobbling up smaller wikis with tempting financial offers. I took a decade+ off and only recently found myself drawn back into the hobby in the last couple of years when I found a game I loved that had a burgeoning wiki that seemed to need help.

I was handed admin privileges within a month because an extension I wanted to use (ReplaceText) was locked behind admin. Two years later, I'm still there because I hold 85-90% of the edits on it. And I. Just. Can't. Get. Help. Not even from the site owner that handed me admin. I've gotten interest from I think seven whole people in all that time, and all but two dropped off within a week or two; the remaining two have a page or two they each maintain but leave the rest of the site to me. And this is a live service game, so it's a neverending stream of event pages and new content that I, and only I, keep going. (Worse: the live service content follows predictable formats, so most of my new pages start by copying another page. This would be so easy for anyone to learn.)

No one wants to learn how to edit wikis anymore. It doesn't have to do with the high position or the rules of a specific site. It's a dying hobby viewed as too hard for content consumers to wrap their heads around.